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Buddhism and the State in Burma: English-language discourses from 1823 to 1962.
Jordan Carlyle Winfield, BA (Hons,) MA. Asia Institute / School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne.
This thesis examines three English-language discourses on the relationship between Buddhism and the state in Burma: its core focus is a postcolonial narrative produced largely by Burmese lay Buddhists writing in English, a narrative that I examine with reference to two other Anglophone discourses – a nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial European narrative and a mid twentieth-century narrative produced by academic historians and other scholars, most of them non- Burmese. The thesis contributes to recent scholarly efforts reappraising the narrative of Buddhist primordialism or changelessness in Burmese state-society relations that has dominated English language scholarship on Burma in the twentieth century. I also highlight the significance of English as a language for discussing Buddhism in Burma, paying particular attention to the colonial and early postcolonial periods, when English was a language of education and statecraft.
The thesis begins by examining the emergence of twentieth-century English-language scholarly discourse on the relationship between Buddhism and the state in precolonial Burma. I suggest that three core concepts have guided the modern academic understanding of this relationship: the concept of the state as a religious entity, the concept of the state as a harmonious mirror of the greater Buddhist cosmos and the concept of the sangha as the state’s most influential constituency beside the monarch. I trace the emergence of these core concepts by examining three influential texts by three well-known scholars produced at three different periods in the twentieth century. I use this this academic discourse about the relationship between Buddhism and the state in precolonial Burma as a point of reference and contrast for the other two strands of English-language writing that this thesis examines – colonial-era discourse and the postcolonial discourse which inherits and challenges colonial ideologies.
The thesis then considers an earlier stratum of English-language commentary on Burmese religion and society produced by precolonial and colonial observers between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These writers contrasted a ‘pure’ idealised Buddhism with a ‘corrupt’ and ‘degenerate’ Burma, setting up a dichotomy between a simple and ‘correct’ textual template and a degenerate local reality. I assert that there is a continuum of English-language discourse about Buddhism in Burma: while the British deployed this narrative as a justification for colonialism, it was coopted by later postcolonial authors who placed a ‘pure’ Buddhism at the centre of Burmese political life, subverting the characterization of Burma as backward.
The core of the thesis is an analysis of how postcolonial lay Burmese authors, writing about Buddhism in English in the years from 1948 to 1962, imagined Buddhism as a modern philosophy in an effort to lend religious legitimacy to the postcolonial state. This discourse linked Buddhism to three key ideologies that epitomized modernity: science, socialism and democracy. The similarities of Buddhist doctrine to scientific theories and to Marxist materialism and democratic individualism were emphasised in an effort to imagine Buddhism as a rational and modern philosophy. Colonial discourses were both inherited and refuted in an attempt to articulate a Burmese Buddhist modernity.
In the course of English-language writing on Burma, the central role of Buddhism in its society and history has always been given special emphasis. No English-language observer, commentator, scholar or journalist has failed to notice and remark upon this connection. In the early twentieth century, Major C. M. Enriquez, a colonial official and author who wrote a number of romantically titled works on Burma, noted in the first of these, A Burmese Enchantment, published in 1916, that :
Buddhism is the central feature of Burma. Its influence is visible everywhere. Its monuments cover the land. Its essence broods unseen over everything. It hallows the repose of deserted shrines. It is the support of the people. It impregnates their ideas, guides their actions, supplies their motives, pervades their atmosphere.Similarly, another British author – the sinologist Edward Harper Parker – writing a decade or so earlier in 1893, noted this connection and rooted it in the distant past, providing a translation from ‘the chapter on “Southern Barbarians” in the T’ang history’ wherein he observed that the fourth century inhabitants of the country, known to us as the ‘Pyu’:
are devotees of Buddhism. They have a hundred monasteries, with bricks of vitreous ware, embellished with gold and silver vermillion, gay colours, and red kino. … The people cut their hair at seven years of age and enter a monastery. If at the age of twenty they have not grasped the doctrine, they become lay people again. For clothes they use a cotton sarong, holding that, as silk cloth involves the taking of life, it ought not to be worn.
Importantly, Parker follows up this excerpt with a deliberate comparison with Burma as he saw it in the nineteenth century: It will be at once evident that a great deal of this descriptive account exactly corresponds with the Burma of our time: the golden couch, the elephants, the dislike of taking animal life, devotion to Buddhism, numerous temples, temporary embracing by all youths of the monastic discipline…point unmistakably to well-known Burmese characteristics of to-day.
